Summary [8.5 out of 10]

Sequel to the 2007 original, Assassin’s Creed II again follows Desmond Miles’s adventures in the mind bending Animus as he escapes the evil Abstergo Industries and once again plunges into his genetic memory. Instead of heading to the Holy Land of 1149,  Desmond jaunts to Italy during the Renaissance taking control of young assassin to be Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Again on the hunt for the Piece of Eden, Desmond is also supposed to be learning Ezio’s assassin skills as he grows from novice to master.

This installment sets out to improved the flawed gameplay of the first effort and push the story along in a meaningful way. It generally succeeds with this and is a fun if not perfect gameplay experience.

Editor’s Note: The real gem of Assassin’s Creed II is the advancement of the insanely complex and robust story line that weaves true Italian history together with sci-fi underpinnings that bind the far-off past, with the more recent past and the future. I absolutely loved the story in this game.

Introduction

I didn’t really care for the first game. The repetitive gameplay really bogged down the experience especially when the gameplay wasn’t that fun to begin with. It was a great idea and really bad execution. I didn’t follow the sequel with much interest but good word of mouth made me go ahead and pick it up.  I am glad I did. Assassin’s Creed II is a good example of how to improve on a game that didn’t deliver but had promise. It doesn’t fix everything and there were things that can be really annoying but it is a great step forward and Ubisoft did an excellent job.

Editor’s Note: I forced myself to not play Assassin’s Creed 1 more than 2 hours at a time because of all the “it’s too repetitive!” complaints I read, and I really wanted to enjoy the game. Doing that allowed me to not get frustrated with the repetitive gameplay and instead sit back and enjoy the story. I thought the first Assassin’s Creed was generally excellent — incredibly ambitious, well executed (ignoring the repetition) and a lot of fun to ‘experience’.

The Great

• You Feel Like a Badass: This is the number one thing just because when I played the first one I didn’t feel like a badass as much as I felt like a lumbering goofball sitting on benches trying to overhear conversations or a klutz with cerebral palsy trying to pick-pocket. Here there is no doubt that Ezio is not the sort of guy you want to mess with. And this doesn’t just go for the cut scenes. I very rarely felt like my character couldn’t handle what he was up against. It doesn’t mean it was easy necessarily just that Ezio is generally well prepared and the game lets you use that. An example of what I am talking about is a moment where you have to save some NPCS from a cage and there are two guards stationed at the door. I could have had a big fight, or killed them from a distance but what I did was walk straight up to them. They started to say ‘Hey you don’t be…’ and at that point I stabbed them both in the throat with wrist blades and opened the door to the cage. When I shanked them, my girlfriend sitting next to me said ‘woah.’ And I said ‘yeah, I am a badass.’ It is a nice feeling and you get it in spades in Assassin’s Creed II. There is nothing worse than being an assassin in a game and being a complete push over.

• Combat Options: This ties in with the above point which is that you have a lot of choices on how to deal with enemies and hostile situations. You can go for a quick semi-stealthy kill, have a big sword or knife battle, take them out at range, take the enemies’ weapons away to use on them,  throw sand in their eyes and run away, use hired help to distract or kill them, or just leg it out of there and hide.  You never have to do exactly the same thing twice if you don’t want to and it is a nice change of pace.

• Gameplay: While this category is kind of general and kind of ties in with the first to two points, it is no less important. You never run out of interesting things to do in Assassin’s Creed II. Where the first game felt like the same thing over and over, this one treats you to a variety of activities to keep you occupied and few seem like a waste of time. In addition to the main missions, the open world structure gives you several different diversions, the majority of which are optional and most of which are really fun. What’s more, it all feels to flow out of the story very organically and doesn’t feel tacked on to extend the overall completion time.  It makes for a solid experience with very little wasted time.In addition to those things, the variety of play styles is very good too. You can do a lot of things a lot of ways. You can swim, which is an improvement over the last game and opens up new dimensions of evasion and locomotion, you can blend into the crowd, which also improves the mechanic from the last game, you can drive a horse drawn cart in a frantic way in the mountains, you can fly a very flammable and borderline annoying hang glider, and you can even commandeer gondola’s in Venice. All of these things really break up what could be monotonous gameplay and keeps it all fresh.

• Fun: As nebulous as it sounds, the game is just fun. I had a great time playing it and whatever short comings it had were generally made up for by the fact that it was a blast to play. I found myself really wanting to play it and really wanting to keep going, not out of obligation or boredom but just because I had a good time doing it.
• Editor’s Note: Story story story — it’s an epic tale being told that so expertly weaves together real history from Italy, actual characters from history that are realized true-to-form and then combined with the sci-fi story Assassin’s Creed is trying to tell… for anyone that likes those kinds of stories, it’s awesome.
• Editor’s Note: Renaissance Italy was re-created in Assassin’s Creed 2 with such love and attention that it deserves to be in The Great list. The detail of how the canals connect, how big the cities are, how many different buildings there are, crowds, conversations, ways to get around… the Ubisoft team must piss talent and shit taste because they’ve done an incredible job here.

The Good

• The Graphics: Most of the time Assassin’s Creed II is gorgeous. The architecture, lighting, water effects, and character models are all beautiful-in Italy. As long as you are Ezio in Italy, the game looks great. When you are Desmond in the future, things look a bit more generic and the character models are boring and sometimes really ugly. I don’t really understand it, and I am not sure if separate teams handled the two different segments of the game but the out of the Animus sections don’t look great. Thankfully, a good 95% of the game is spent in the Animus looking fantastic. The viewpoint moments are truly breathtaking. Facial animations and character movement look very good and little touches like a courier carrying a box looking away before accidentally veering into you show the level of attention given to this part of the game.  The locations are all based on real locations and look very accurate to their real life counterparts (though I can only recognize them from photographs) and are themselves beautiful to look at.

• Story: The story is convoluted nonsense but at the same time manages to be compelling. Ezio has an interesting personal arc as his father and brothers are executed and he goes on the run to eventually coming to terms with being an assassin an what that means for his family. From there he delves deeper into the overreaching conspiracy and learns more about why the assassins are fighting against the Templars. That being said, the material with Desmond is much less compelling and feels like a distraction compared to the reasonably rich tapestry being woven with Ezio. Even with that, the pieces of Desmond’s story told through glyphs found and analyzed throughout the cities manage to be compelling and interesting. So again, like the graphics, the vast majority of the story is quality and only a relatively small amount is complete nonsense. The dialogue is generally very good as well and is occasionally very funny. Early on, Ezio’s mother suggests he invest in a hobby and when he tells her he has hobbies she replies ‘I mean one that doesn’t involve vagina.’ Maybe I just have the taste of a 12-year-old but that is golden.

• Historical Figures: It may not seem like a big deal but many of the supporting characters are based on real people. I really like this. It gives the story more weight and makes you feel like you are in the real world even when shrouded in the sci-fi stuff. It was pretty heavily publicized that you got to pal around with Leonardo DiVinci, who helps you out with decrypting codex pages and giving you some steam punk style gadgets, but you also rub elbows and cross swords with the likes of Niccolo Machiavelli, Caterina Sforza, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Pazzi family, and Rodrigo Borgia who eventually became Pope Alexander VI. Not only does this ground the story in history but I think it raises historical awareness amongst players who may not have ever cared about figures from the Renaissance but now may have a built in interest even if those figures may not have been part of some sort of ridiculous conspiracy (even though Pope Alexander VI was, in fact, a complete bastard).

• Controls: Generally speaking the controls work very well. The button mapping is good and the layout is not confusing. Some of the contextual controls are not great and will lead to some small issues, but by and large Ezio does what you want him to when you want him to do it. Combat is easy to get the hang of and to implement and movement is generally accurate. This goes into the good section, however, because there are some issues which will be addressed in the bad section. But overall the controls do a fairly good job of what they are supposed to do.

• Upgrading: Assassin’s Creed II is very into upgrading. You can upgrade armor, weapons, clothing, your villa and your fighting skills. All of it costs money but the money system is robust and the more you upgrade, the more money you get. As soon as you get to your villa pretty much everything you upgrade serves to improve the value of your villa and in turn the amount of your income from said villa. You can renovate and improve shops and institutions in your villa from banks to the brothel and each increases the overall value and income of the property. In some cases it even opens up new areas within the villa to explore and loot for treasure. In addition to architectural endeavors, you can also purchase art from around Italy to decorate the walls of your home which raises the villa’s value. These paintings are all classic Renaissance works which show up on your walls looking photo realistic and beautiful. Anytime you upgrade your armor or weapons, your villa gets a value boost and you get more money flowing in. This is a nice mechanic as it gives you a proper motivation for acquiring more things and doing more tasks without feeling like you are being forced or that it has just been tacked on.  The only problem here is that you will eventually run out of things to upgrade and are just gaining a ton of money that you won’t have much to do with. But having too much money isn’t much of a problem.

• Fast Travel: You don’t have to ride around the countryside on a horse to get from place to place if you don’t want to, which is nice because I generally don’t want to. Through these hubs you can bounce back and forth from your villa to a new town and back again if you want without much wait time. It would be nice if you could use them to travel to different parts of large cities if you don’t want to run all through it but whatever, it is nice to just not have to ride across open expanses of wheat field for no good reason whatsoever. That being said, sometimes there cool things to be done out in the country so being able to take a horse out there to do them is pretty cool too. The game is good at giving you options and this is more evidence of it.

• Voice Acting: While some of the accents can be a bit dodgy, the voice acting is generally pretty good. There’s some star power from Kristin Bell and the increasingly prolific Nolan North and the supporting cast does a good job sounding generally authentic as well. It is good to hear Cam Clarke make an appearance as subject 16 although it would have been cool if he could have played Leonardo diVinci after having played Leonardo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. One is named after the other after all, but now I am just so far into fanboy geekdom I may have just gotten my virginity back.

The Bad

• Collision Detection:  There are a lot of moments in Assassin’s Creed II when you are asked to pick something up and carry it somewhere, or you have to pick up a body so you can hide it in some hay, or pick up a weapon so you don’t get run through and Ezio will stand directly over whatever it is and wave his hand around as if he is trying to gently push someone out of his way. The context command is very clearly listed as ‘pick up body’ but Ezio insists on not doing that at all and rather moving his hand as if he is being attacked by a swarm of slow moving flies. So you have to futz with the stick a bit to try to get him into just the right position to stop moving his hand around and actually pick whatever it is up. Then when you are about to turn off the game and run outside naked and screaming, Ezio will pick up the object for no apparent reason as you are back in the original position where it wouldn’t work in the first place. This is very annoying and happens a lot. If you are going to have the player pick things up then it is a good idea to program a consistent system for actually doing that.Editor’s Note: I didn’t encounter this issue during my playthrough on the Xbox 360. Desmond seemed to pick up things fine for me, BUT, I never tried to hide any bodies… I would throw them in the streets as proof of how awesome I was.

• Frustrating Free Running: Now it just may be because I have played InFamous and Uncharted, but the free-running can be really annoying in this game. Climbing and locomoting on rooftops is way more frustrating than it needs to be. This is owed mostly to the game deciding what you want to do without actually waiting for your input. So you get stuck hanging from a bit of lattice when you are trying to chase someone or you leap from the side of a building instead of grab on to what you need to grab on to. This wouldn’t be so bad if so much of the game weren’t dedicated to climbing, running across rooftops and chasing guys. The otherwise fun segments where you are platforming to get to the assassins’ tombs are rendered frustrating messes by Ezio doing things the player did not tell him to do. I am perfectly willing to cop to my own failures with a controller but about 7 out of 10 times that I would plummet to my death or jump into water instead of the platform right in front of me  it was because the game decided that was much more reasonable than what I had indicated with my button presses. As the game goes on, you get better at avoiding this sort of thing by adjusting for it the way you might account for the wind when shooting an arrow, but it remains a problem all the way through. When you have the nearly flawless Parkour mechanics found in InFamous it is really unacceptable to have a problematic system here.Editor’s Note: This is a blessing and a curse. The “auto pilot” running that Assassin’s Creed games employ can make you look awesome easily, but it also can lead to the wrong leap, jump or maneuver about 20% of the time. There are definitely parts where you go flying off a roof instead of leaping across to the next one cause the game mis-interpreted your intention.

• Final Battle: Without saying to much, the very last boss fight is boring, easy and ridiculous. If that is all it was I would have much preferred to just walk up and assassinate him instead of the nonsense I was forced into.Editor’s Note: I didn’t mind this, I was tired of chasing dudes down and by the end just wanted the story’s conclusion, I didn’t want an epic 30 mins battle. I didn’t mind this being short/easy. I liked owning his ass!

• Lame DLC: You have two memories missing that bridge a two year gap in the story. There’s been a lot made of the ‘story reason’ for this but it basically amounts to an excuse for downloadable content. So you have two chapters that will come out later to download and I think it is kind of crap.  I don’t have a problem with DLC, I think it is cool when new scenarios can keep the game alive but I have a real problem with those things being built in to the game at retail. I thought it sucked when Dragon Age did it and I think it sucks here. Don’t make the main story feel incomplete just so you can chisel us for more cash later. If you want to do DLC, great, make it something ADDITIONAL to the main story, not something missing from it. I get that you want people to hold on to the game and not trade it in so someone else can buy it used and deprive you of dollars but don’t safe-guard against that by depriving me of story and content. Because my response is to trade this in for Mass Effect 2 and maybe buy it used again down the line to play the DLC. Maybe.

• Replay: While the game allows you to go back and do stuff you hadn’t done yet after you’ve finished, if you did a lot while you were playing through, there is not much left to do or much of a reason to keep playing. There also isn’t much reason to start over for another play through as there are no branching options or different things to see. It is what it is and when you are done you are done. It is too bad too because it is fun to do the first time and it would be nice if it could be fun to do again albeit a bit differently.

Conclusion [8.5 out of 10]

Assassins Creed II isn’t a staggeringly awesome game that will knock you on your butt and leave you breathless, but it is a very solid and fun game that is worth recommending for a play through. There are issues to fix in the next iteration but they are not deal breakers here and the improvement from the first to the second is the difference between repetitive unplayable mess to fun and enjoyable game with some room for more improvement.

I liked playing Ezio a lot more than Altair and I hope that the next character will be even better. Assassin’s Creed II mostly makes good on the promise of the first one and I had a really good time with it. The game is long enough and the side quests don’t feel like filler. The addition of real historical figures and events really help to create a rich story and environment in which to interact and the fun of it all outweighs most of the frustrating issues that fell through the cracks. It isn’t perfect but it is well worth your time.

Editor’s Note: Assassin’s Creed 2 is a “must play” for anyone that liked the story so far and liked Assassin’s Creed 1. If you didn’t like the first one, this one won’t convert you. It does polish the game to a nice shine, but if you weren’t already sold on this type of gameplay, it’s not different enough to make you think twice.

My recommendation is to absolutely uncover all the glyphs to unlock the secret video.